Frédéric Houvert

Born in 1980, Frédéric Houvert is an artist who lives and works in Lyon.

If the mediums vary with Frédéric Houvert, ornament remains the central element of his artistic practice. The motifs, always of vegetable origin, remind us of the intrinsic relationship between the decorative arts and the Fine Arts throughout history.

Synonymous with order and perfection from antiquity to the Renaissance, revealing the artist's mastery of materials and technique, the ornaments bend to a rigid organization. If with Frédéric Houvert the aestheticizing power of the patterns is always very present, the rigor of the composition has given way to an arrangement with a complex dynamic.

The first order is erased, revealing an apparent chaos, thus drawing the drawing towards abstraction. Leaves and flowers dissolve through the superposition of patterns and their very materiality is questioned. The latter also seems to be disintegrating on the canvas.

The softness of the colors taking place in the background, leads his works towards a feeling of timelessness. Modernity and tradition embrace each other through the treatment of the motifs, which are reminiscent of those of bourgeois interiors whose initial splendor is somewhat decrepit. Frédéric Houvert's work can be perceived as a perpetual manipulation of reality through the figure of motifs, thus allowing an opening to other forms of existence: those of the mind.